Having covered the video game world for many years, it’s a market you can certainly call mercurial, and the ups and downs can be very abrupt. Technology and story-wise, video games have never been better, but I’m glad I’m not in the gaming business, because it can go from top of the heap to the basement with little warning.
So at this point, how is the video game market doing? About this time last year, things got a big boost from Halo 4 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. Grand Theft Auto V also did incredible business this year, hitting incredible new heights in terms of sales. Now USA Today reports that this year video games could hit $93 billion in sales.
This figure comes from a research firm Gartner, and they also feel gaming will hit $111 billion by 2015. Gaming is certainly up from 2012, where sales were at $78 billion, so there’s no doubt this year’s $93 billion is a very good sign.
A rep from Gartner told USA Today, “This growth is fueled by healthy premium mobile device sales globally and a desire to play games on these multifunction devices that are capable of displaying increasingly sophisticated game content.” USA also predicted that mobile gaming will go from $13 billion to $22 billion by 2015 as well.
So it’s good to see that games are back, and are apparently bigger than ever. Here’s to even bigger growth down the road.
